The Signal and the Noise
One tweeter boasted of a "game-changing victory" for crowdsourcing in the early hours of the Boston area manhunt. But what began as a low-grade fever on social media spiked with the wrongful naming of a bombing suspect. All the while, Nieman Visiting Fellow Hong Qu was testing his new tool Keepr as a screen for credibility and posting early results on Nieman Reports as the story unfolded. Qu and journalist Seth Mnookin, who tweeted live from the manhunt, write about how smartphones and their unprecedented power to publish require new journalistic tools and practices, while other Nieman Fellows consider the intersection of social media and journalism in the aftermath of the attac
To be walking about a college campus with a knapsack on my back at age 39 was a great gift. It was all the greater for having had my first go at college compromised by a bus crash that broke my neck when I was 19. And so, having long since graduated from wheelchair to cane, I did not struggle to set aside career for classroom. I happily put down my pen.
Half-Life
By Joshua Prager
Byliner
132 pages
Still, there was something that I wished to one day write, a book about the crash and its place in my life. But I had tried and failed to write it for almost as many years as I had been disabled.
As my months at Harvard passed, something curious happened. All that I read and heard attached itself to those thoughts about life that remained unresolved in me; my seminars, for example, on Melville, Ecclesiastes and personal identity, prisms through which to reexamine my lot. I myself was less elusive. And so, come spring, my thoughts had begun to cohere into what resembled a philosophy. I felt closer to knowing what I wished to write.
But how to write it? My good friend Darcy Frey, NF ’11, noted that when I spoke of the crash, I often spoke of where I was disabled. And so, he suggested that I root each chapter of my book in Israel.
Fall arrived and I returned to Jerusalem with a new voice and structure in mind, hopeful that I might at last respond to the runaway truck that paralyzed me on May 16, 1990, hopeful that I might at last write my book. Four months later, I had—the whole of “Half-Life” written.
www.joshuaprager.com
Half-Life
By Joshua Prager
Byliner
132 pages
Still, there was something that I wished to one day write, a book about the crash and its place in my life. But I had tried and failed to write it for almost as many years as I had been disabled.
As my months at Harvard passed, something curious happened. All that I read and heard attached itself to those thoughts about life that remained unresolved in me; my seminars, for example, on Melville, Ecclesiastes and personal identity, prisms through which to reexamine my lot. I myself was less elusive. And so, come spring, my thoughts had begun to cohere into what resembled a philosophy. I felt closer to knowing what I wished to write.
But how to write it? My good friend Darcy Frey, NF ’11, noted that when I spoke of the crash, I often spoke of where I was disabled. And so, he suggested that I root each chapter of my book in Israel.
Fall arrived and I returned to Jerusalem with a new voice and structure in mind, hopeful that I might at last respond to the runaway truck that paralyzed me on May 16, 1990, hopeful that I might at last write my book. Four months later, I had—the whole of “Half-Life” written.
www.joshuaprager.com
